Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Why You Need to Give Your Social Marketing a Good Spring Cleaning

1) You can re-evaluate your visual content strategy.

Visual content has become one of the most important parts of social marketing, across every possible platform. Twitter revealed a new UI that places a heavy emphasis on visuals, both in tweets and in user profiles. An infographic on Wishpond revealed that on Facebook, photo posts tend to receive 84% more clicks than those that opted for just text or a link. Any smart business knows that the best way to market today means having a visual content strategy in place. If you haven’t refreshed your user profile picture, cover photo, or banner in awhile, or if you haven’t been pushing visual content at all, now is a great time to start creating a cohesive visual brand through social media.

Go through all of your social accounts and make sure any visuals that are already up don’t look outdated or off for the post they accompany. If you run a tire shop, but went through a phase were you posted two weeks worth of cute animal pictures to try and drive engagement, now might be a good time to get rid of those posts. Make sure that your visuals are as aesthetically pleasing as possible and professionally done in good lighting – no blurry images filtered to the point of being unable to tell what’s happening in the photo.

2) Stop following crummy, dead, and dummy accounts.

Remember when #followfriday and #teamfollowback were valid hashtags you could use to attract new followers on Twitter? Luckily, the social sphere has evolved since then and most people would agree that just following random people, hoping to get a new follower, is not social marketing. If you’ve been on Twitter, Instagram, or any social media site that allows the ability to follow other users for a long time, you should de-clutter your follow list every few months. Delete any dead, inactive, or spammy accounts – I like to use justunfollow for this, but there are plenty of different apps that can help you clean up your list. You should really only follow people who you would want to engage with, learn from, and talk to.

3) Start pushing your social presence everywhere.

And I mean everywhere. Your social identity should be as integrated into your brand as your logo and company name. It isn’t enough to stick a couple of links onto your site’s homepage – you need to include links to your social profiles in your email signature, in the author credits for any content you write, and even on your business cards. Though a business card might seem obsolete, sales are said to increase 2.5% for every 2,000 business cards handed out. The entire point of social marketing is to bring new customers to your business, and you want to spread your social presence as wide as possible. Having, and even being proud, of your Facebook or Twitter account isn’t odd, so be your own social evangelist and push these profiles wherever you can.

The trick to keeping your social presence fresh is to make time to deal with the backend of running a social campaign. You can be producing great, relevant content, but if no one sees it if or if people don’t know where to find you, how is it beneficial to you in the long run? And the same goes for your visual presence too - you want a cohesive, attractive look throughout all your social platforms. First impressions are still everything and if your Twitter account has a pixilated version of an old logo, or your Google+ banner is blurry, you need to fix it, or people aren’t going to engage with your profiles. Put aside a few hours to make the edits and style revisions this month and watch your social marketing begin to flourish.